Market Samurai

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Due to a recent pricing increase for Long Tail Pro, from a one time fee to a more expensive monthly/annual subscription model, several people in the community reached out to me asking if there are cheaper alternatives available.

This is not at all a reflection of the Long Tail Pro product. They have done a great job converting Long Tail Pro to a completely online, cloud-based tool.

In addition, they also added full lifetime access to their Long Tail University training program and access to a Private Facebook group, specifically for Long Tail Pro annual plan customers.

So at $25/mo paid annually through my discount link, an annual subscription to Long Tail Pro Platinum is still a great value, especially when compared to the prices of several competing products below.

However, if that is a bit steep for you, read on because there is a cheaper alternative available.

Research Process Breakdown

I was fully expecting to have multiple, cheaper, options to choose from when I started my research.

Much to my surprise however, I was quite shocked at the price of competing products these days. Now I understand a little better why the folks at Long Tail Pro decided to do what they did.

Additionally, much of this was out of their hands, as Google changed the way different software providers access their data, making it more costly for them.

I searched for lots of related articles on the topic of keyword research tools and gathered many of the existing names I was already aware of and added any that were mentioned multiple times recently. The results are included at the bottom of this post.

Some offer a “free” version, or even display the word “free” prominently on their main page trying to say the product is completely free, but that was not the case for any of them.

You are either severely limited on what you can do in the free version, forcing you to upgrade, or you are limited by the results you will see making the free version pretty much useless.

And The Winner Is…

The winner is Market Samurai.

It is similar feature wise to LTP and it is the only product listed that has a one-time only fee of just $97, through my link.

To get the $97 rate, sign-up for the free trial and you will receive a time-limited email for 35% off, which brings the price from $147 to $97.

I actually got started on my online journey many years back, with Market Samurai. However, it has been a few years since I’ve used the product regularly, so I fired it up to make sure everything still worked as expected.

Everything did work and it was much faster than it was several years back, but there is one main caveat that should be mentioned.

As a result of the increased costs to pull relevant data from Google, the people at Market Samurai made the choice to switch to Bing for most of their keyword research data.

Since most of us use Google as our benchmark and strive to rank on Google, vs Bing, this is not ideal.

Unfortunately they had to either do that, or switch to a subscription based model like many of the other tools mentioned, so they decided to switch to Bing and remain the lowest cost option available.

The Keyword Research module can still help you find relevant keywords to target and the numbers are still very helpful when comparing different phrases against each other.

Additionally, the Competition Analysis module does pull the top 10 results for the phrases you are targeting from Google.

However, the specific keyword numbers such as search volume and CPC values does come from Bing. I wanted to make sure you are aware of that, as I do not see that mentioned very often elsewhere.

Below you will see a full pricing breakdown of all the products that I researched.

It is very clear to see that the industry has definitely shifted to a monthly/yearly subscription model and it really makes sense, given that it is costing them more to pull the relevant data from Google.

If you are looking specifically for the lowest cost option, Market Samurai wins.

In today’s Podcast Episode, I talk about two main topics… 1) How to quickly increase traffic on any of your existing websites. 2) How to make a full time income in your spare time. The motivation for these topics came from recent articles that I included in the references section below. On the Podcast, I …

In today’s Podcast Episode I quickly address my most common question, which is to explain my process for doing keyword research for authority sites. In addition, I provide a quick update on renting/selling websites targeting local search terms, from Episodes 93 and 94. I’ve gotten some great feedback via email and from the folks in the …

In this weeks Podcast Episode, I talk about several of the unavoidable frustrations with Affiliate Marketing and give you some actionable advice on how to prepare for and overcome them, when they inevitably occur. This is a super important episode that I will let primarily stand for itself in audio format, as I think …

In my prior posts on keyword research and sizing up your competition, I helped you figure out how to choose potentially profitable keyword phrases, helped you narrow things down and showed you how to quickly identify whether or not you stand a chance of being able to compete for a spot on the first page …

Continuing where we left off on the keyword research post, by using Market Samurai we determined that we were going to try and target the term “clearance baby clothes” as our primary keyword phrase for our new site and as a backup we have “vintage baby clothes”. What we want to do now is size …

This post will provide specific, step-by-step instructions on how to identify a killer keyword phrase for your Niche Website or Blog. In the next post, I will continue this example and dig into SEO Competition to size up the competition for the keyword phrases we come up with. The exact screen shots may vary slightly …

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Keyword Research

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